Out of the Shadows of the World Trade Center Plot; Investigators Tracking Global Threads of Evidence Go After Motives and Methods

Published: August 7, 1995

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While Mr. Yousef's origins are still murky, some reports say he grew up in Kuwait in a Palestinian refugee family, studied engineering at Swansea in Britain and fought in the war in Afghanistan. He speaks Urdu, the main Pakistani language, as well as Arabic and English.

Some reports say he gained his bomb-making expertise in Peshawar, the Pakistani town near the Afghan border that was the center for many guerrilla groups during the Afghan rebellion against Soviet invaders in the 1980's. The town is also the center of the Khyber Pass mountain frontier, a lawless area that has become a training ground and sanctuary for Middle Eastern terrorists.

Shortly after his arrival in the United States on Sept. 1, 1992, Mr. Yousef sought recruits through the Jersey City mosque of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric whose most ardent Muslim followers are militant opponents of United States policies in the Middle East.

For the last seven months, the Sheik and 10 other men have been on trial in Federal Court in Manhattan on charges of conspiring to blow up the United Nations and other buildings, bridges and tunnels in New York. None of those defendants were charged in the trade center bombing, but prosecutors say both cases were part of a conspiracy to wage urban terrorism in this country.

Through the mosque, investigators say, Mr. Yousef recruited Mohammed A. Salameh, Nidal A. Ayyad and Mahmud Abouhalima, who helped him buy and mix explosive material in cheap apartments and a storage space in Jersey City. An Iraqi, Abdul Rahman Yasin, also was said to have been recruited.

Ahmad M. Ajaj, a Palestinian with Mr. Yousef on the flight from Peshawar, was caught using a doctored Swedish passport and jailed for six months, until three days after the trade center bombing. Prosecutors said he had been helping Mr. Yousef carry military manuals.

Two weeks before the bombing, the investigators said, Mr. Yousef called Mr. Ismail, a Palestinian immigrant and boyhood friend then living in Dallas. Mr. Ismail came to New York and, with Mr. Yousef at his side, drove the van carrying the bomb into the trade center, officials said. The blast killed six people and injured 1,000.

Within hours, Mr. Ismail flew to Amman, Jordan, and Mr. Yousef, using the name Abdul Basit, flew to Karachi, Pakistan, and disappeared into the terrorist nether world. Mr. Yasin was questioned by the F.B.I., fled a day later and is still being sought. Mr. Abouhalima flew to Jidda, Saudi Arabia, four days after the bombing, but was caught in Egypt two weeks later.

Mr. Abouhalima and the men left behind -- Mr. Ajaj, Mr. Salameh and Mr. Ayyad -- were convicted last year in a five-month trial that amassed 10,000 pages of testimony from 207 witnesses. All were sentenced to 240 years in prison. Clues Are Found In the Philippines

For 22 months, there was no trace of Mr. Yousef, although he was suspected in a March 1994 plot in which Islamic radicals tried to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. The plot -- remarkably like the trade center case -- fell apart when a rented van carrying explosive chemicals hit a motorcyclist.

Last January, his trail was picked up in the Philippines, where he had moved last fall. He called himself Naji Haddad, said he was a Moroccan, rented an apartment near Manila Bay and, officials said, began his terrorist recruiting.

Investigators say Mr. Yousef forged ties to Abu Sayyaf, a rebel movement that seeks the establishment of a separate Muslim state in the southern Philippines, and found dozens of recruits among Arab residents and Muslim Filipinos. He chose 25 for a group that was to attack Americans and bomb airliners and other American interests throughout Asia, officials said.

But his plans went awry on Jan. 6, when he set off a fire as he mixed bomb chemicals in his kitchen sink. He fled before firefighters and the police arrived, leaving behind containers of acid, timing devices, wire, fingerprints and a laptop computer filled with details of his plots to kill the Pope, who was due in Manila within days, and to blow up American jets. Maps of the papal routes, pictures of the Pope and priests' robes were also found.

Investigators said the computer held plans to bomb an American jet in Manila on Jan. 12 and plans for a horror to surpass the trade center blast: the bombing of two United Airlines jumbo jets, one from Los Angeles and one from Singapore, as they were both flying into Hong Kong on Jan. 22. The bombs could have killed more than 700 people.

A document in Mr. Yousef's Manila apartment also tied him to the bombing of a Philippines Airlines jumbo jet flying from the Philippine city of Cebu to Tokyo on Dec. 11, when a Japanese passenger was killed and 10 others were wounded. Officials said the bombing had been intended as a practice run for attacks on American planes.

After Mr. Yousef escaped, six people from his purported group were arrested and others were hunted, some of them from the rebel Abu Sayyaf group.

Mr. Yousef went underground, then to Islamabad, Pakistan, the investigators said. There, acting on an informer's tip, American and Pakistani agents seized him at a rooming house last Feb. 7. He was flown to New York to face charges in the trade center bombing.

In April, prosecutors widened the case against him with new charges of trying to blow up airliners and planting the bomb that killed the Japanese passenger. They also disclosed links between him and seven Arabs arrested in Denmark in 1994 on charges of plotting to bomb a United Nations conference in Copenhagen. The fingerprints of two of the men matched those found on bomb manuals Mr. Ajaj was carrying into this country with Mr. Yousef in 1992, officials said.

In another development, investigators said, six men -- three Sudanese, two Pakistanis and an Iranian -- were seized in March in Peshawar. They were all traced through calls made by Mr. Yousef the night before his arrest to numbers that were disconnected within 24 hours.

Mr. Yousef may have intended to seek refuge in Peshawar, which had been his base before New York, before Manila and Hong Kong. Some intelligence officials say the last secrets of the trade center case may lie in Peshawar, in the murky world of Muslim extremists and Afghan resistance fighters.

Chart: "Path to the World Trade Center Bombing" lists how Federal law enforcement officials think the conspirators planned and executed the bombing of the World Trade Center.